This exhibition and related events explore the current place of civic ideals in urban life and contemporary art practice. It references Dublin's 1914 Civic Exhibition which was inspired by the work of Scottish biologist, sociologist and planner Patrick Geddes and which attempted to re-imagine Dublin as “the phoenix of cities” during a period of economic, social and political strife. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists' responses to the urban environment using different strategies to understand and represent the city. It includes work by Stephen Brandes, Mark Clare, Cliona Harmey, Vagabond Reviews, Stéphanie Nava and Mary-Ruth Walsh.

Brought to you by Dublin City Council
With the support of the French Embassy in Ireland

Early Indian matchboxes carried beautifully designed labels showing images of Hindu deities and legendary scenes; over time they took on a multitude of themes, ranging from the mundane (keys, lamps, fruit, farm animals) to the exotic (lotus flowers, glamorous beauties, fighting tigers and elephants) and the comical (a pair of monkeys smoking cigarettes, a baby with a moustache, and a portrait than can be read upside down or right side up).

In the 1970s, the Indian state introduced a scheme to reduce unemployment by allowing small businesses to claim state support; numerous new producers of matches emerged, a large number of them being subsidiaries of better-known companies. As a result, countless new labels were produced, many based on existing classic designs with slight and occasionally very bizarre alterations to the text or imagery.

Nowadays there are obsessive collectors of the ephemeral vernacular images that are the subject of this small exhibition, all of them drawn to the bewildering variety of subjects as well as their humour and charm.

Rose Wylie

Mar 6 - May 13, 2015 Reception: Thu Mar 5 6pm - 8pm

These bold and idiosyncratic paintings result from the artist's response to varied sources, often popular and vernacular.

Rose Wylie’s idiosyncratic paintings are big, generous, and free-spirited. There are artists with whom her work has some connections, but none who have her tone and attitude. Rose Wylie’s pictures are bold, often a little chaotic, occasionally unpredictable, and always fiercely independent, even though they are not at all domineering.

Inspiration comes from many and varied sources, most of them popular and vernacular. Wylie borrows images from films, newspapers, magazines, and the television; she internalises them and allows herself to follow loosely associated trains of thought, often in the initial form of drawings on paper. The ensuing paintings are spontaneous but carefully considered; mixing up ideas and feelings from both external and personal worlds, she paints what she sees.

Rose Wylie favours the particular, not the general; although subjects and meaning are important, the act of focused looking is even more so. Every image is rooted in a specific moment of attention, and while her work is contemporary in terms of its fragmentation and cultural references, it is perhaps more traditional in its commitment to the most fundamental aspects of picture-making: drawing, colour, and texture. She is a special artist.

A new publication with a text by Sara Baume will accompany the exhibition. The Douglas Hyde Gallery thanks the artist and Jari-Juhani Lager of Union Gallery, London, for their support of this exhibition.

Campbell’s work blends the inherent promise of storytelling with the breakdown of narrative and meaning. His preoccupation with truth and refusal to adhere to prescribed or narrative conventions resonate in recent works such as Arbeit (2011) about the German economist Hans Tietmeyer who played a key role in the centralization of the European financial system and Make It New John (2009), which takes as its subject the American automobile engineer and magnate John DeLorean and his iconic DMC-12 car, as well as the West Belfast plant where it was produced. Similar notions are addressed in Bernadette (2008), his documentary about controversial Irish republican MP and civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin.

Duncan Campbell completed the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 1998 and a BA in Fine Art at the University of Ulster in 1996. He lives and works in Glasgow. Campbell set up the artist-run radio station ‘Radio Tuesday’ and has knitted versions of nightclub posters. In 2013 Campbell represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale. In 2012 Campbell took part in Manifesta 9, Belgium, and in 2010 he took part in Tracing the Invisible, Gwangju Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Duncan Campbell, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylanvia (2012); Arbeit, HOTEL, London; Make it New John, Artists Space New York (2011) and Chisenhale Gallery, London, touring to Tramway, Glasgow (2009 – 11); The Model, Sligo; Belfast Exposed, Belfast; Bernadette, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; HOTEL, London and Baltic, Gateshead (all 2008–9). Recent group exhibitions include Year of Cooperation, Broadway 1602, New York and Critique & Clinic, Berlin Film Festival, Berlin (2012); British Art Show 7, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham and Hayward Gallery, London (2010).

The exhibition is accompanied by a guide, which is freely available at IMMA reception, or you can click here to download (pdf).

In a newly commissioned solo exhibition for Project Arts Centre, Garrett Phelan explores the power and influence that cultural traditions and artefacts have on the contemporary psyche. Through the recollection of his experience of witnessing the winter solstice at Newgrange, and numerous visits to ancient sites throughout his life and travels, he questions the power such antiquated relics hold over us today.

The exhibition comprises two new video works and sculpture. The first video work is divided between a storytelling monologue by the artist and a dramatically filmed grouping of ambiguous gold objects. These real and imagined encounters with ancient monuments and relics are punctuated within the gallery by sculpture composed of microphones, cables and glass. The second piece is a throbbing animation, both hand-drawn and computer animated, flicking through many of Phelan’s most emblematic images.

Phelan’s visiting and imagining of ancient monuments plays on a deeper exploration of personal politics, the desire to decipher the world and the limitation of our understanding. Phelan asks if we can ever really be free from inherited social practices? From the conditions and belief systems that shape and accompany us through our formative years and thereafter? Can we be free from institutions? Free from symbols? Free from history? It is an agonised position and these are agonised questions. But they are questions asked around the proximity of neolithic stones, of enduring objects which in Garrett Phelan’s way of thinking may have achieved this idea of freedom.